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'Fake Geek Girls': How Geek Gatekeeping Is Bad For Business

The presence of a “Geek Out” section on CNN.com, as established and establishment a media outlet as one could ask for, suggests that, at least when it comes to page views, geek has entered the mainstream. However, a recent opinion piece by the writer and designer Joe Peacock suggests that there is still some growing up to do – and it is going to have to be in public.

Peacock’s piece – titled “Booth Babes need not apply” – trots out the familiar trope of the “ fake geek girl” – the woman who is pretending to be a geek for reasons of her own. We’ve seen this device before, many times – indeed, we saw it here on Forbes.com, with Tara Tiger Brown‘s “Fake Geek Girls – Go Away!”. Kirk Hamilton of Kotaku – a real geek boy, to the best of my knowledge – said in response to that article:

Imagine: You meet a girl, and you get to talking. You talk about your jobs, your neighborhoods; you talk about your interests. As it turns out, the two of you are into a lot of the same things. This is cool! Wow, she likes the same obscure slasher flicks and retro video games that you do. How lucky for you both!

Wait. Be careful. This could all be a ruse. She could be… a Fake Geek Girl.

Oh no actually, false alarm. Turns out she’s just a person who is into stuff to varying degrees. There’s no such thing as a Fake Geek Girl.

Which is probably true, but conceals another point – the idea of the “fake geek girl”, and the self-appointed geekquisitors rooting them out, are bad for business.

Faking it seriously

Of course, there are people who pretend to like things more than they actually do, for many reasons – popularity, protective camouflage, hoping to impress a member of the same or the opposite sex. Let those who have never feigned interest in a boss’ account of the last nine holes cast the first stone.

A woman may be dressed as Batgirl, and yet not able to tell you if she is Barbara Gordon, Cassandra Cain or Stephanie Brown. That might be because she genuinely doesn’t care, or because she has only just discovered Batgirl, and has nobody to get advice from.

And that might be because whenever she tries to talk about Batgirl, she gets the geekquisition on how deep her knowledge of the Batman mythos is, before being dismissed as insufficiently knowledgeable – a “fake geek girl” just looking for attention. Eventually, they will either learn to dress conservatively and keep quiet, or they will give up – either way, sales and brand equity are lost, for very little gain.

We need to talk about Batman

Which brings us back to Peacock, who reports:

There is a growing chorus of frustration in the geek community [cit. req.] with – and there’s no other way to put this – pretty girls pretending to be geeks for attention.

San Diego Comic-Con is the largest vehicle, but it’s hardly the only convention populated with “hot chicks” wearing skimpy outfits simply to get a bunch of gawking geeks’ heads to turn, just to satisfy their hollow egos.

One immediately curious thing here is that, for such a seasoned convention-goer, Peacock appears not to know what “booth babe” means – or possibly what booth babes are.

Of course, many of the the scantily-clad women at SDCC are there because they are “booth babes” in the generally understood, if still disparaging, sense of the term. They are models or event staff, full- or part-time, who have been hired and costumed by promoters in the belief that women in skimpy outfits will sell whatever product they are promoting.

There are ways to address this – the PAX events, for example, have a policy limiting the use and the appearance of these promotional models. Generally, I would like to see sexualized advertising in general more carefully controlled in supposedly family-friendly events, but I can tell the difference between the player and the game.

It is pretty clear that “booth babes” – in the conventionally understood sense – are not doing it to “satisfy their hollow egos”. They are doing it because it is a paying gig, and it is a paying gig because someone not on the convention floor thinks they will encourage people on the convention floor to buy product, take and share photographs and generally further the interests of the brand.

(In a subsequent blog post, Peacock has explained that, for him and apparently his friends, booth babe “is a pejorative used at conventions to describe any guy or girl who doesn’t actually care about the industry, the fiction, the fandom or the culture – they’re just there to get attention or a paycheck.” So, his usage is eccentric, and he is unaware of how eccentric it is, or this is a post hoc justification.

For the purposes of this discussion, this is not particularly relevant, however: he does not mention guys in skimpy outfits, or indeed remuneration in any currency apart from attention.)

The enemy within

So, if not actual, according-to-Hoyle booth babes, who is Peacock talking about? Happily, he explains:

I’m talking about an attention addict trying to satisfy her ego and feel pretty by infiltrating a community to seek the attention of guys she wouldn’t give the time of day on the street.

I call these girls “6 of 9″. They have a superpower: In the real world, they’re beauty-obsessed, frustrated wannabe models who can’t get work.

They decide to put on a “hot” costume, parade around a group of boys notorious for being outcasts that don’t get attention from girls, and feel like a celebrity. They’re a “6″ in the “real world”, but when they put on a Batman shirt and head to the local fandom convention du jour, they instantly become a “9″.

They’re poachers. They’re a pox on our culture. As a guy, I find it repugnant that, due to my interests in comic books, sci-fi, fantasy and role playing games, video games and toys, I am supposed to feel honored that a pretty girl is in my presence. It’s insulting.

I read this, and felt very sad. Sad for Peacock, but also sad for anyone who feels this way. The underlying premise here is that male geeks are so unattractive, indeed so collectively repulsive, that there is a 50% gap between what they will find attractive and the attractiveness standards of any given other human being.

A normal-looking woman will, simply by standing near geeks – people Peacock seems to believe to be only 66% as attractive as regular people – become a supervixen. From “OK, maybe” to “oh, X-baby!” in a single bound.

And, conversely, if a woman in a Batman shirt ever speaks to you at a convention without having first established her credentials, the correct response is immediate suspicion. After all, they couldn’t be attracted to you, or just want a conversation. Chances are, they are after your attention.

If this is making your skin crawl, that’s sort of the point. It’s a pretty awful way to feel about one’s own culture, before we even get into how it is likely to corrode one’s feelings towards women.

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A trend I’ve seen whenever topics like that come up is that the angry person’s personal experiences (or their friend’s personal experiences or what they’ve heard are real personal experiences) become the rule.

Hence we get, “All the girls I know just play video games to get hit on!” and “Most girls only want to read manga, not super hero comics!” (that one I heard today, actually). I also find it insulting when these commenters describe hot chicks as if they’re some sort of alien race far above us all … because as a nerd girl, what does that make me, exactly?

But the most horrific thing about this piece is the suggestion by Peacock that “hot fake nerd girls” practically deserve harassment on X-Box live … that’s dangerously close to “If you didn’t dress like a slut, maybe you wouldn’t have gotten attacked.”

By setting some sort of bar that requires women to prove themselves in order to be accepted as geeks, we’re buying into the very sort of mainstream sheep-like bullying and misogyny that permeates the very parts of pop culture we geeks claim to try to avoid. By trying to exclude women from geek culture you are ignoring a powerful marketing force. The more popular geek culture gets the more we encourage new generations of amazing writers, gaming innovators, comic book creators, and many more that this is a viable career choice and and the better and more exciting our particular geek specialty becomes. As for girls like Olivia Munn and others like her, whether or not they are “sufficiently geeky” is irrelevant to me. They are helping a whole generation of geek girls feel good about themselves. They are showing little girls that they can be pretty and feminine and enjoy things like video games and comic books without shame. I wish ladies like them would have been around when I was a kid. Imagine how much fun it would have been to know I wasn’t the only girl in the world who like both D&D and Vogue?

Too bad, that’s how geekishness works, guys do it to each other constantly, what the guy is saying is there’s a double standard, we don’t ask it of women. They come in, put on some outfit and suddenly they’re a geek? No, geeking out is just that, a great deal of enthusiasm for something, geeks go after each other over minutia because they have an immense enthusiasm for whatever they geek out about, people who enter into this as pretenders are fakes and SHOULD be rooted out.

No one’s trying to exclude women, either, we’re trying to exclude the female equivalent of attention seeking fake douchebags, we’re allowed to root out the male version but not the female version? Yet more twisted double standards.

Popular geek culture? That’s like saying popular goth culture, part of being a geek is indeed being “other” than popular, it arose out of unpopular things and obsessions and passions, popular is often caring very little for anything, it’s “cool” not to. Indeed popularity is often the antithesis of geek culture, it is a state of waxing, waning interests in the moment, being a geek for something is passionate and focused.

I am actually upset, because Olivia Munn is an actual geek, but Felicia Day isn’t in the least, nor are the Ubisoft girls, Munn plays hardcore games, she loves to cosplay, she’s a total nerd and I think that’s great. I also wish more of them were like Olivia, or even Mila Kunis who is also a gamer, but not fakes like Felicia or the myriad of others who don’t even geek out over anything or have passions or do nerdy things, they’re bad role models and they draw more of their ilk into the geek fandom and that’s just a bad thing.

I think having women “awaken” in geek culture where they were previously a minority is fantastic, but to exclude them from the standards of being a geek invites in the tidal wave of fakes we’ve seen, from gaming geeks to comic geeks, there’s a lot of them and they just aren’t welcome. Fakes are unwelcome on the male side and always have been, women have to accept equal treatment to become a viable half of geek culture, articles like this do not help, pandering to false notions of McCarthyism when I can go to forty youtube channels worth of fakes.

Well, this is a problem, isn’t it? Olivia Munn is a handy punchbag for these kinds of accusations, because the idea that Olivia Munn is a “fake geek girl” is so entrenched that nobody will go into bat for her. But if you’re going to think of “fake geek girls” as something you have to root out, what do you do when it turns out that your fellow out-rooters think someone you esteem is a fake geek? Different people have different standards and different issues. If you want to make your particular idea of a geek community be about establishing pecking orders and mating rights through competitive trivia-offs, that’s certainly something you can do, but you probably need to accept that when you let all the venn diagrams of valued knowledge and personal issues intersect, your legion of the pure is going to be smaller than the generally accepted set of geek. For you, Olivia Munn is a real geek and the Frag Dolls aren’t. For others, that is reversed.

Regarding the general rooting-out process: no, I don’t think anyone is being prohibited from being geekquisitors, if that’s genuinely something fun you want to do with your time. Making other people feel bad is, after all, part of what life’s all about. However, it’s counter-experiential to say that the same process is taking place in every circumstance. I’d imagine, for example, that ogreunderthebasement (elsewhere in these comments) is happy to break bread with male geeks who have not spent 24 solid hours playing a tabletop RPG, because the issue has simply never come up, whereas it seems that to be a female geek is to be immediately under suspicion. Men who work in Gamestop don’t get quizzed on their competence to sell their customer a game, as a general rule – it’s just a retail transaction – but I’ve heard from female employees who have had exactly this experience. That’s probably a double standard.

If you have managed to buck the odds, that’s great, but it seems pretty clear that women are more intrinsically disturbing to the Force for many of the Consulars at the gate: you’ll notice that the original article was about women – women who thought they were pretty, women who weren’t all that pretty really, women who appeal to the basest urges of geeks, women whom one can somehow tell are looking down on you, the real (male) geek. If you’re upset about all those sorta good-looking men playing on the basest sexual desires of your fellow male geeks, I’d say have at it in the spirit of equality: but it’s a different issue, and I’d say a relatively niche one.

Yes, part of that is she didn’t get to reveal much of herself for a long period of time and gamers came to doubt her credibility at her admissions of gaming specifically being her weak point, but she came into gaming and now she’s part of the geek culture there. Her case was exceptional, a model that was a secret geek for other things crossing over into a different sect of geek, she was much more of a technology geek hence her immense appreciation of Star Wars and science fiction in general. I’ve made a reputation over the past twelve years of pushing back on misconceptions over at IGN alone, I am constantly pushing back on RAGE misconceptions after Carmack personally gave me a Steam key much later after learning I returned the PC version over performance issues at launch I came to discover it was actually a great game and so I began the push back and continue to this day, I do it for any misconceptions I come across. That’s not my prerogative, it’s just a part of geek culture, you can’t separate the idea of challenging each other on knowledge from geekdom, it’s like telling goths they can only wear yellow. This isn’t some fictitious issue of “standards”, that comes into it when you actually are a geek and it becomes a measure of degrees, the issue is these pretenders have no enthusiasm for it, they aren’t geeks in any sense, they just want the popularity, attention, fame, they’re leeches. I was actually hard on the Frag Dolls, so I will say to the exclusion of Sabre they are mostly the above, Sabre is real, she plays card games, tabletop, etc, she’s more of a geek than I am even. The others tend to try and find out what’s “le popular guiz xDDDD” and throw themselves in front of it while making sure five pounds of mascara weigh down their eyelids.

They are being shamed for it by these rags, such as Kotaku, that leaves the wrong impression on people, that there’s this witch hunt for apparitions and that isn’t so, and I don’t think anyone considers it “fun”. Your focus is on degrees, for degrees you need a thermometer, which is really the problem, they don’t have a bead on this because they flat out aren’t geeks at all. I’ve been to Gamestop plenty, though I’d never buy games from them, and the guys are constantly quizzed and talked to about games, a real gamer girl game in(with hot pink hair no less) and was just going on at length about games with the portly bearded fellow at the counter, it was interesting. The one time a female worked there I approached her and tried to strike up a conversation about games only to discover she knew nothing, after eventually turning away I saw the guys snickering, she was gone within the month. Gamestop itself is mostly quite casual and to work there without knowledge of games seems impossible for either sex, it’s working at a hair salon knowing nothing about hair. Say I struck up a conversation on how D3 ended my relationship with Blizzard with the aforementioned bearded fellow and he didn’t know what D3 was rather than the long nuanced conversation we had about what went so very wrong, it would reflect poorly on the company. The double standard may exist, and that’s growing pangs really, girls in gaming is still a growing aspect of geekdom, girls in any of it really, for guys to challenge who they perceive as newcomers is natural, it just happens that newcomers encapsulate a sex, so it’s become a charged issue.

I covered why men react to the newcomers in such a way, and I dismiss your assertion that the real equals male, it was a girl who rallied against them on Forbes and I have no intention of defending Peacock. I also dismiss that this is a niche problem, if it was a niche problem we wouldn’t have a year or more of coverage, articles, opinions, and growing female presence in geekdom. Taking that position is counter-intuitive and helps perpetuate the double standard, the real one, that women in gaming are to be treated differently rather than allowed to grow into it. When the gaming “press” takes an institutionalized stance of always defending all women in geekdom, shirk ideas of them needing to even be geeks to be here, and rail against those who say otherwise, it generates a hostility towards women in geekdom that itself becomes institutionalized. Women have to come into this on their own, the fakes need to be stripped away over time, and there needs to be equality. When you have rags like Kotaku acting like dogmatic shills for any fake that puts on glasses and proclaims the cake is a lie it does not help, it creates the negative circumstance. The worst part of this is how it deceives the emergent female geek, especially the gamer variety, they enter into it with an institutionalized belief that guys are out to get them for being fake at all times when no such fakes exist, these sites perpetuate that falsehood, and the worst it does is turn girls away from gaming over a patent lie. I would personally call on gamer girls such as Tara to join in, to end this press pandering that does a lot of harm the push-back against fake geeks needs to be legitimized, and the only way to do that is to involve the female element thus taking away the fallacious sexist argument.

“Making other people feel bad is, after all, part of what life’s all about.” What sort of awful condescending sarcastic response is that?

Honestly, I *do* question people’s competence when they’re selling me a game. So much so that Gamestop is an unacceptable place for me to shop because I utterly loathe the employees and their absolute lack of knowledge when it comes to games.

Do I require anyone to have done tabletop roleplaying to consider them a geek? Do I need them to have written fanfiction, watched every episode of Star Trek, or played old school 8-bit games? No. Because everyone is a geek of their own category – nobody is an “everything otaku,” nor should they be. People have differing takes and interests.

However, the pure essence of *being* a geek – as pointed out in Tara Tiger Brown’s article, which you were so ready to dismiss at the beginning of this article – is the idea of dedication, obsession and enthusiasm. Someone who is a geek doesn’t “dabble”. As illustrated, they *take time away* from things that *would be a better idea* or considered more fun by the rest of the world. Someone who hasn’t sat down for a full weekend playing World of Warcraft isn’t a World of Warcraft geek. They can like World of Warcraft, sure. They can even be still figuring out their feelings about it, and may end up becoming a World of Warcraft geek. I am all for people feeling encouraged to engage in geek culture and find their niche.

The problem is when you allow people to get the idea they can play a game once or twice, for thirty minutes one day, and then assume they’re a geek. That’s not what being a geek is about. And the issue here is about labels – they LABEL themselves as geeks, and try to “sell” themselves as such. You think the problem is nominal and nonexistent? All it takes is some careful searching on YouTube to find the thousands of channels of women posing with low cut shirts in a room with an Xbox 360 behind them talking about how they’re hardcore gamers. Hell, you can find the same thing being done by men, trying to show off their “badass geek” for their skills at Modern Warfare. Only they tend to be thirteen.

It’s deplorable, and it’s not because I’m not being “open enough to their own personal definition of geek” – it’s because I’m following a guideline already set, already defined. You don’t get to say you’re a black belt unless you are actually a black belt. You don’t get to say you’re a chef unless you’re a chef. These categories have their appropriate litmus tests – being a geek has its own subtleties. Is it possible for people to have their own “purist” camp as to what being a geek is? Sure. Absolutely. But the thing is, these people will have these standards for everyone. It shouldn’t matter whether someone is a man or a woman – if someone hasn’t re-read Harry Potter multiple times, dressed up like a character for Halloween and written Harry Potter slash fanfiction, I don’t consider them a Harry Potter geek (maybe we can exclude that third one).

Anyone who has additional standards they want to put women under is just a sexist. And unfortunately, because you’re trying to go so “easy” on the idea of women as geeks, you’re coming across as one, too. Don’t give people a free pass.

I am particularly sulfured that articles like that Kotaku one are allowed to go mainstream, because it’s garbage. Kotaku has become an awful peddler of lies, hearsay and sensationalist media. I, like you, fear for the casualties of this kind of thinking propagated among the masses because I WANT people to feel curious about “geekdom”, to give being a geek a try. I’m not against emergent geeks – I love and embrace them. Kirk Hamilton is spreading misinformation and a false sense of hostility by essentially peddling the idea that “attractive women shoul be treated with hostility”. This has never been any Good Guy Geek’s intention or line of thinking, and its mere existence is enough to send me into a rage. That’s completely astray from the point people are trying to make with “fake geek girls” – we’re talking about “fake geeks” in GENERAL, and those who would try to garner attention based on a label they’re not dedicated to. So don’t reference Tara Tiger Brown and Kotaku in literally the same breath. You make them sound one and the same, and that’s such poor journalism.

I went to art school. I spent time with the sequential art majors, the performance art majors, animation and game design majors, visual effects majors. Geeks, geeks all of them! Some of them obsessed with slash fiction fanart, some with supernatural erotic novels, some with SNES emulation. I would never question any of their authenticity. But none of them ever used it to try to get attention – none of them used it to get fans or YouTube subscribers. Being a geek is personal, something you do because you love it, because you *cannot stop*. Anyone who does otherwise, who doesn’t carry around a Nintendo DS because they’re obsessed with IV training their Pokemon, who is constantly looking for other people with a PSP for a Monster Hunter match, who go home for another guilty three hour round with Tales of Symphonia, need not try to claim they’re a geek.

I think you’ve misread what I wrote, Garrett. I said: “If you’re upset about all those sorta good-looking men playing on the basest sexual desires of your fellow male geeks, I’d say have at it in the spirit of equality: but it’s a different issue, and I’d say a relatively niche one.” The niche issue here is not concerning women…

Since when is being a geek exclusive to gaming culture? Most geeks I know know Portal, yes, but would a comic book geek know, necessarily? Whoever is making up these standards is simply trying to create camps where they don’t exist.

Do you know how Flash stopped Braniac in Justice League Unlimited? A DC Universe geek would. Immediately they’d be able to tell you the intimate details, and speak about it with candor.